Obama *always* looks bad when he's working

Like everyone else, I've been disappointed in Obama's public wishy-washy-ness, his pathological desire for compromise and consensus with a lunatic opposition. Time and again it looks like he backs off and backs down and the Republicans run roughshod all over him, when he could make a different choice to stand up stronger, speak up earlier, or use the language of a more forceful conviction.

I don't want to deny his moral failures: on any number of anti-terrorism practices (government surveillance, Guantanamo Bay, the PATRIOT Act, ad infinitum), or the financial meltdown. On the other hand, despite superficial appearances, he has clearly been working against DADT (the Pentagon's "no gays" policy) and DOMA (the Defense of Marriage Act, which prevents the federal government from recognizing same-sex relationships): these are clearly going down. Yesterday the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals denied the government's feeble defense of DADT and lifted its stay, meaning the military had to stop enforcing it immediately, rather than "as soon as we're certain it won't impact operations." The administration's "defense" of those laws has been hard to judge: one Justice Department brief on DADT, in particular, was viciously homophobic. In retrospect, it looks more like the administration has been giving everyone cover and saying "okay, well, we tried to defend it, we failed," while the courts rightfully eviscerate them. It's been a long and complicated game.

So it's depressing to watch what looks like him getting batted around on the debt ceiling issue by the GOP, like a budding sociopathic child pulling the wings off a fly. But it wasn't all that long ago that we were saying the same things about him during the health care reform process, which most of us were surprised to find ending in the passage of an imperfect bill that nonetheless puts us well on the road to truly universal health care.

Several times now, Obama has played Rope-a-Dope, allowing himself to suffer bad political optics while playing more subtle games to successfully accomplish his goals. To be honest, I think he's earned a little benefit of the doubt. Let's sit back and let the man work.

linkfarming

I've been busy studying to get a job, but somehow I always find time to read...well, mostly crap, really, or things you would find breathtakingly dull, but here are some interesting bits.

• Road safety over the past century.
• Starbucks' new 31-ounce "Trenta" size vs. the human stomach.
• Up to half of Americans under 65 can be denied insurance due to pre-existing conditions.
• The Atlantic has an essay about the culture of Duke University. It's based on a slideshow a Duke student made and sent around, graphically detailing the 13 men she'd had sex with. I haven't finished the slideshow, but the essay seems spot-on.
• "Sheikh's father is also a rat catcher. His brothers sell vegetables from a cart and wish they could be rat catchers too."
• The Conservative Constitution of the United States.
• I SUPPORT EVERYONE'S TROOPS. Ouch.

28 days

Cool link of the day: large optical illusion sculpture.

Departure is coming up fast. I have a long list of things yet to do, but I've decided not to be stressed about it. I also seem to have decided that trying to get individual health insurance is not worth the trouble: that even if I'm accepted, they'll easily find some cause for rescission if I actually need to make a claim. I'll find some travel insurance for the overseas part, anyway.

(Factoid: it kind of looks like having health insurance doesn't make a difference in your mortality rate; economists investigate, with links here and here. Note that this doesn't say anything about the desirability of insurance, or measures of your health or quality of life; it's just "are you more likely to die".)

The mailing list for the Chile group is...a fountain of insights into my fellow travelers. At least two are middle-aged women, so my theory about it being mostly younger twentysomethings seems to be wrong. Among other things, there have been a variety of views about how prepared we should be, what we should bring, that sort of thing:

• "I don't know what to pack!" (the thick booklet they sent us has at least 2 pages of packing lists and recommendations.)
• "I grilled the volunteer who interviewed me, and she said she only brought one skirt and two shirts and she was fine. And she packed the night before she left." (certainly a valid approach, though not one I'm a fan of.)
• "I know we're all worried about the cold, but I just checked the weather and it's 80F in Santiago. Stick that in your burrito, compadres. I think we can relax and have some fun first!" (possibly my favorite. I'm pretty sure they don't eat burritos in Chile, and the quotes from past volunteers go on at length about how it's not only cold, but they don't do much for heating.)

The Field Director sent out a long email with more details about meeting us at the airport and such, along with a gentle but firm reminder that it does get extremely cold and they don't heat the buildings, and past volunteers have neglected to bring warm things and have had to have them sent from home.

There are 17 of us. There are only 2 down in Patagonia, which is why I didn't get into that one: it's fully-funded, and they had a lot of applicants.

We're volunteering directly with the Ministry of Education, but before the Ministry training, we have ten (10) days of WorldTeach training. I don't know how long the Ministry training is, or where my placement is.

We're expected to round out our classroom teaching by starting extracurricular stuff. Normally it seems that's a drama club or something English-related, and technically I could do that (I'm a bad conductor, but probably up to the task of teaching people some a cappella singing if I needed to). But in reality the things that are important to me that I have enough skill to share with people are aikido and Zen practice. So I'm thinking more and more about that, especially aikido which is more universally accessible...hopefully I get a chance to teach people how to play with me.

turning off the news

I'm speechless with rage at the seemingly unlimited uselessness of the Democratic Party. I had hoped that after the cowardice of the BushCo years, once taking power the Democrats might actually govern. And Obama embodied that hope: I didn't buy into the messianic thing that so many people did, but I did believe very strongly that at least grown-ups with a shred of human decency might finally be in charge.

But no. The spinelessness of Congressional Democrats seems to know no bounds. I had always thought you could at least rely on politicians to want to get re-elected, since it's too much to ask them to care about human beings per se, but they're not even doing that calculus: they seem ready to commit mass political suicide by letting health care die, because...I'm not sure why, exactly. Because they don't have a Senate supermajority? As Jon Stewart points out, President Shrub never had one, and he ran roughshod over everything anyway.

It's like all the cards are on the table, and it turns out that

1. Democrats never wanted to pass health care reform anyway, and this is their excuse to bail on it, and
   
2. the only thing the Democrats really want is for Republicans to like them, which is like sucking up to the school bully in the hope he won't punch you and steal your lunch money like he has every day for the past sixteen years.

It's pathetic. The Republicans are grasping amoralists, but at least they have ambition. They want things to happen, badly enough to ignore the rule of law and basic ideas of human rights and welfare. Democrats, it seems, don't want anything. Nothing motivates them; they just stumble around in a moving sea of mediocrity and then squeal like panicked cowards if anything difficult comes up.

The BushCo years were tragic, and that orgy of criminal incompetence made me angry, but this...this is the first time in my life I've ever seriously considered giving up on the American experiment, which I've loved ever since I was a kid and Dad taught me how it worked, in all its glorious insanity. But democracy requires ambition, and better yet, competing ambitions: people who want social justice, more powerful corporations, fundamental civil rights, warrantless wiretapping, all making their arguments, and out of that comes the direction of the nation, for better or worse. Now one party is batshit insane, ruled by fundamentalists insisting the President is secretly a Kenyan Citizen Muslim Fascist Communist Atheist, and the other party is rocking back and forth, curled up in a puddle of its own urine in the corner. Democracy can't function like this.

I've stopped reading political news, because I don't need the heartbreak or the rage, and I have plenty of packing to do and other things to keep me busy before I leave town for a little while. Especially after this week, I could use the time away.